Charles II

by G. K. Chesterton

There are a great many bonds which still connect us with Charles
II., one of the idlest men of one of the idlest epochs. Among other
things Charles II. represented one thing which is very rare and
very satisfying; he was a real and consistent sceptic. Scepticism
both in its advantages and disadvantages is greatly misunderstood
in our time. There is a curious idea abroad that scepticism has
some connection with such theories as materialism and atheism and
secularism. This is of course a mistake; the true sceptic has
nothing to do with these theories simply because they are theories.
The true sceptic is as much a spiritualist as he is a materialist.
He thinks that the savage dancing round an African idol stands
quite as good a chance of being right as Darwin. He thinks that
mysticism is every bit as rational as rationalism. He has indeed
the most profound doubts as to whether St Matthew wrote his own
gospel. But he has quite equally profound doubts as to whether the
tree he is looking at is a tree and not a rhinoceros.

This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so
prominently in the lives of great sceptics, which appears with
especial prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean their
constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman
Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but
so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas,
more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For it
is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man to say that
there is no God in the universe is like saying that there are no
insects in any of the stars.

Thus it was with that wholesome and systematic sceptic, Charles
II. When he took the Sacrament according to the forms of the Roman
Church in his last hour he was acting consistently as a
philosopher. The wafer might not be God; similarly it might not be
a wafer. To the genuine and poetical sceptic the whole world is
incredible, with its bulbous mountains and its fantastic trees. The
whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could
presume to violate it. Transubstantiation might be a dream, but if
it was, it was assuredly a dream within a dream. Charles II. sought
to guard himself against hell fire because he could not think hell
itself more fantastic than the world as it was revealed by science.
The priest crept up the staircase, the doors were closed, the few
of the faithful who were present hushed themselves respectfully,
and so, with every circumstance of secrecy and sanctity, with the
cross uplifted and the prayers poured out, was consummated the last
great act of logical unbelief.

The problem of Charles II. consists in this, that he has
scarcely a moral virtue to his name, and yet he attracts us
morally. We feel that some of the virtues have been dropped out in
the lists made by all the saints and sages, and that Charles II.
was pre-eminently successful in these wild and unmentionable
virtues. The real truth of this matter and the real relation of
Charles II. to the moral ideal is worth somewhat more exhaustive
study.

It is a commonplace that the Restoration movement can only be
understood when considered as a reaction against Puritanism. But it
is insufficiently realised that the tyranny which half frustrated
all the good work of Puritanism was of a very peculiar kind. It was
not the fire of Puritanism, the exultation in sobriety, the frenzy
of a restraint, which passed away; that still burns in the heart of
England, only to be quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it
is seldom remembered that the Puritans were in their day
emphatically intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on
the logical necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence
itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the
damning fact that they had a complete theory of life, through the
eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never satisfy.
Like Brutus and the logical Romans, like the logical French
Jacobins, like the logical English utilitarians, they taught the
lesson that men's wants have always been right and their arguments
always wrong. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who
appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and
polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a
man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. The
tyranny of the Puritans over the bodies of men was comparatively a
trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a
trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason
over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and
raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for
it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be
homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, but
because they were rationalists.

When we consider these things, when we remember that Puritanism,
which means in our day a moral and almost temperamental attitude,
meant in that day a singularly arrogant logical attitude, we shall
comprehend a little more the grain of good that lay in the
vulgarity and triviality of the Restoration. The Restoration, of
which Charles II. was a pre-eminent type, was in part a revolt of
all the chaotic and unclassed parts of human nature, the parts that
are left over, and will always be left over, by every rationalistic
system of life. This does not merely account for the revolt of the
vices and of that empty recklessness and horseplay which is
sometimes more irritating than any vice. It accounts also for the
return of the virtue of politeness, for that also is a nameless
thing ignored by logical codes. Politeness has indeed about it
something mystical; like religion, it is everywhere understood and
nowhere defined. Charles is not entirely to be despised because, as
the type of this movement, he let himself float upon this new tide
of politeness. There was some moral and social value in his
perfection in little things. He could not keep the Ten
Commandments, but he kept the ten thousand commandments. His name
is unconnected with any great acts of duty or sacrifice, but it is
connected with a great many of those acts of magnanimous
politeness, of a kind of dramatic delicacy, which lie on the dim
borderland between morality and art. 'Charles II.,' said Thackeray,
with unerring brevity, 'was a rascal but not a snob.' Unlike George
IV. he was a gentleman, and a gentleman is a man who obeys strange
statutes, not to be found in any moral text-book, and practises
strange virtues nameless from the beginning of the world.

So much may be said and should be said for the Restoration, that
it was the revolt of something human, if only the débris of
human nature. But more cannot be said. It was emphatically a fall
and not an ascent, a recoil and not an advance, a sudden weakness
and not a sudden strength. That the bow of human nature was by
Puritanism bent immeasurably too far, that it overstrained the soul
by stretching it to the height of an almost horrible idealism,
makes the collapse of the Restoration infinitely more excusable,
but it does not make it any the less a collapse. Nothing can efface
the essential distinction that Puritanism was one of the world's
great efforts after the discovery of the true order, whereas it was
the essence of the Restoration that it involved no effort at all.
It is true that the Restoration was not, as has been widely
assumed, the most immoral epoch of our history. Its vices cannot
compare for a moment in this respect with the monstrous tragedies
and almost suffocating secrecies and villainies of the Court of
James I. But the dram-drinking and nose-slitting of the saturnalia
of Charles II. seem at once more human and more detestable than the
passions and poisons of the Renaissance, much in the same way that
a monkey appears inevitably more human and more detestable than a
tiger. Compared with the Renaissance, there is something Cockney
about the Restoration. Not only was it too indolent for great
morality, it was too indolent even for great art. It lacked that
seriousness which is needed even for the pursuit of pleasure, that
discipline which is essential even to a game of lawn tennis. It
would have appeared to Charles II.'s poets quite as arduous to
write 'Paradise Lost' as to regain Paradise.

All old and vigorous languages abound in images and metaphors,
which, though lightly and casually used, are in truth poems in
themselves, and poems of a high and striking order. Perhaps no
phrase is so terribly significant as the phrase 'killing time.' It
is a tremendous and poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic
parricide. There is on the earth a race of revellers who do, under
all their exuberance, fundamentally regard time as an enemy. Of
these were Charles II. and the men of the Restoration. Whatever may
have been their merits, and as we have said we think that they had
merits, they can never have a place among the great representatives
of the joy of life, for they belonged to those lower epicureans who
kill time, as opposed to those higher epicureans who make time
live.

Of a people in this temper Charles II. was the natural and
rightful head. He may have been a pantomime King, but he was a
King, and with all his geniality he let nobody forget it. He was
not, indeed, the aimless flaneur that he has been represented. He
was a patient and cunning politician, who disguised his wisdom
under so perfect a mask of folly that he not only deceived his
allies and opponents, but has deceived almost all the historians
that have come after him. But if Charles was, as he emphatically
was, the only Stuart who really achieved despotism, it was greatly
due to the temper of the nation and the age. Despotism is the
easiest of all governments, at any rate for the governed.

It is indeed a form of slavery, and it is the despot who is the
slave. Men in a state of decadence employ professionals to fight
for them, professionals to dance for them, and a professional to
rule them.

Almost all the faces in the portraits of that time look, as it
were, like masks put on artificially with the perruque. A strange
unreality broods over the period. Distracted as we are with civic
mysteries and problems, we can afford to rejoice. Our tears are
less desolate than their laughter, our restraints are larger than
their liberty.